Your heart aches for your friends to come to the saving love of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Yet every time you try to say something about Jesus they respond like you have insulted them. You might hear responses like “How can you believe in that crap!” or “You take me for in idiot!”. These are common response to our modern presentation of the Gospel Message.

Our modern methodology of sharing the Good New is distant from what Jesus said and did. He did not run around telling people “You are a sinner. I am going to die on a cross to make you right, so now believe in Me.” If you dig into the Gospels you will not find these phrases. Jesus used methods that struck much deeper into a man’s heart. He used stories to pull at the heart strings of the people He was ministering too. The stories had depth, character and He back up these stories of the Kingdom with healings and raising people from the dead. His disciples for centuries have continued to share the same stories that Jesus told and stories of what he did in healing people and raising the dead. These stories have helped strengthen the church for over two thousand years.

I would like encourage you to share these same stories that the Holy Spirit has given us because your friends have not heard these stories. If you turn on some religious programing on the FM dial you can catch some preacher reading something from the Bible and then explain what it meant. That is not telling the story. A well told story has emotion, eye contact, expression and a person with convection delivering the true story. Could this be you?

Do your friends like to listen to a well told story? Most people do. There are a number of parables Jesus told that you can pepper into your conversation. They are short just two or three sentences or a few are little longer like a small paragraph. Jesus gave a series of parables talking about what heaven is like. They are very short, “The Hidden Treasure”(Mathew 13:44), “Pearl of Great Price”(Mathew 13-45-46) or “The Mustard seed” (Mathew 13:31-32). Then there is the entire Gospel of Mark, which is a series of stories told back to back.

Story telling has been around since the beginning of man. The Jewish people kept their faith alive by telling the Story of God in their homes passing them down to their children. Jesus told many of these stories and added to them. Jesus sent out the seventy and they only had stories that Jesus had equipped them with and their first hand account of what they saw Jesus do. Jesus designed it such that the stories need to be delivered in person by you and not some dusty book. Are you up to the challenge?

If you slide a few stories into your conversations with your friends they will not be insulted. They will be intrigued and have opinions and question about the story. If you tell it well then they will want to hear more. Do you have to say these stories are from the Bible? Only if they ask.

The question that needs to be answered is: What do you leave behind? Make an impact, leave a Lizard Track.

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